Pierre Buyoya
Pierre Buyoya was president of Burundi twice, from 1987 to 1993 and from 1996 to 2003, both times by coup. He was a Tutsi major from Bururi who took power from Bagaza to reopen the churches and handed it, in the first free election the country had held, to the Hutu Ndadaye, who was murdered by Tutsi officers four months later. He then took it back from the Hutu government that followed, fought a civil war for seven years, and signed the Arusha agreement with Mandela's hands on his shoulders. He handed the office to a Hutu vice-president on the day the agreement said. The first presidency began with the massacres of Ntega and Marangara in August 1988, when Hutu peasants killed several hundred Tutsi and the army killed perhaps twenty thousand Hutu. Then he did what no predecessor had. He appointed a Hutu prime minister, a cabinet half Hutu, a commission on national unity, a charter approved by referendum in 1991, and the constitution of 1992 that produced the election of June 1993, which he lost to Ndadaye with a third of the vote, and conceded. The second began in July 1996, when the army put him back after two years in which the Hutu presidents had been unable to govern and the Tutsi militias and the Hutu rebels had killed each other's peasants. The neighbours put the country under embargo for three years. The regroupment camps held three hundred thousand Hutu. The war with the CNDD-FDD and the FNL went on until the Arusha accord of August 2000 gave the country its formula, sixty-forty in the government and fifty-fifty in the army. There was the transition of November 2001 in which he served the first eighteen months and Ndayizeye the second. He honoured it in April 2003. He was born in Rutovu, trained in Belgium, France and Germany. He was a lieutenant-colonel and the party's military secretary when he struck. He was the African Union's envoy to Mali from 2012. He was sentenced in absentia in October 2020 to life for Ndadaye's murder by a court in Bujumbura that heard no defence. He died of Covid in a Paris hospital two months later, on his way from Bamako.
- Lived: 1949 CE – 2020 CE
- Nationality: Burundian
- Roles: president, army officer, politician
